November 2, 2025, will go down as a landmark day in the annals of Indian cricket in general and Indian women’s cricket in particular for the incredible ODI World Cup victory achieved by Harmanpreet Kaur & Co. at the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai.

Women’s cricket in India, which forever remained the poorer cousin of its men’s counterpart, had its ‘1983’ moment when Team India beat the gutsy South Africa team in the summit clash by 52 runs.

To understand the enormity of the victory and put things in perspective, the viewership of the 2025 Women’s World Cup final, which India won, equalled the streaming viewership record of 185 million users on JioHotstar set by the 2024 Men’s T20 World Cup final, where the Indian men had emerged champions.

It was unthinkable and unfathomable at one point to even imagine Indian women’s cricket getting the kind of attention and traction that it is getting today.

However, the journey has been a long and arduous one, and the absolute high of that heady night at the DY Patil has been a culmination of years of agonising failures that the team faced collectively and individual players, who struggled to see a better day for themselves and the team as a whole.

This was India’s third World Cup final after defeats in the 2017 ODI World Cup final in England and the 2020 T20 World Cup........

© Free Press Journal